Interview by Jesse Hamilton. Bo Hines, head of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, is speaking at Consensus 2025, Toronto, May 14.
Strategists for two U.S. bills meant to create an oversight regime for crypto are setting out plans this week to pass legislation in the summer, Bo Hines, the White House official at the center of those efforts, told CoinDesk.
Hines, who President Donald Trump hired as executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, told CoinDesk in an interview that the procedures are being ironed out to move legislation on regulating stablecoin issuers, and the crypto advocates in the White House and Congress will quickly pivot to the bigger bill that will set a full regulatory regime for U.S. crypto markets.
The progress so far puts the efforts "well on pace to achieve what the President desires," he said, which is that both crypto bills reach Trump's desk for signatures before Congress takes its summer recess in August.
The president's adviser, who is a speaker at Consensus 2025 in Toronto May 14-16, said the bills to regulate stablecoin issuers that are moving through the Senate and House of Representatives are "90% aligned," so it won't be a difficult task to bring them together into a unified approach that would still need approval in both chambers."We're in the process of mitigating any differences between the two chambers there, but we feel like, you know, we're in a really good spot to get that passed and signed into law," he said. "It lays the foundation for everything that we can do."
He said the more complex undertaking to write laws for how the U.S. should police the overall markets should emerge in draft bills "in the next few weeks."
While Congress is moving unusually fast, the president's own crypto business interests have been criticized by Democrats who accuse Trump of improperly benefiting from his own policies and of inviting foreign influence from investors in his family's projects. Trump’s interests include stakes in World Liberty Financial and the president's own memecoin, $TRUMP. Hines pushed back, saying the rise of crypto has presented attractive innovations for investors.
"Any good business person would engage in a marketplace opportunity like that," he said. "So, you know, I don't view it as being detrimental in any capacity whatsoever."
The president and his family have the "ability to engage with any marketplace that they see fit," Hines said.
"We're narrowly focused on just doing what's in the best interest of the United States to make the U.S. the crypto capital world, usher in the golden age of digital assets, and we have our binders on to everything else," he said. "That's what the president's asked us to do, and we're going to deliver on his wishes."
The White House official, 29, is known as a staunch loyalist to Trump, who had endorsed the former college football player in the first of his two unsuccessful North Carolina congressional campaigns. Despite his relative inexperience in the crypto field, Trump elevated Hines to a senior White House role to work beside crypto czar David Sacks and act as a "sherpa between White House policy, interagency activity, industry and what's happening on Capitol Hill," as Hines described it.
"We move at a speed that no other administration has ever been able to move before," Hines noted.
Many in the digital assets industry had clamored for a digital assets reserve at the federal level, though the idea for how to approach it varies widely. Trump's campaign-trail promises surged toward reality in March when he ordered his administration to start work on a bitcoin (BTC) reserve and a separate stockpile of other crypto assets.
One point of disappointment for those who'd wished for it was that Trump insisted the reserve be budget-neutral, meaning no new taxpayer money would go toward acquiring assets for the reserve.
Hines has been a prominent booster of this effort. He said the Treasury-led audit of U.S. crypto holdings, which needs to be done to find out the extent of assets (so far unmeasured) that'll be directed into the stockpiles, is progressing quickly. The Treasury Department is now going through audit reports from various corners of the U.S. government, he said.
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